Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead, as are many of his deputies and hundreds of civilians in Iran, after attacks from the US and Israel. Meanwhile American allies across the Middle East, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have been bombarded by Tehran in retaliation, killing more than 20.

So, what next for Iran? We’ve spoken to experts about five ways this war could end – and how likely they are to happen.

Existing regime continues

This, says Anoush Ehteshami, professor of international relations at Durham University, is the most likely outcome, based on the state of play on the afternoon of 2 March 2026.

He told FactCheck that he expects the senior figures who are left in Iran’s power structures will “be more flexible”, but that Iran is looking at “regime adjustment” rather than full regime change. “The regime is likely to stay in power but in a different form”, Professor Ehteshami said.

Urban Coningham, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) told us that rather than regime change, it’s likely Iran will have a “new supreme leader, supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or a clerical leader, who Trump feels he can do business with”.

He explained that the US is unlikely to insist on removing the current regime entirely if it can meet its two key aims: controlling Iran’s uranium enrichment (so that it doesn’t extend beyond civilian use and ensuring that the international nuclear watchdog has access to Iran’s facilities) and securing concessions from Iran on its missile production capabilities.

While Donald Trump has publicly encouraged Iranians to protest against their leaders after mass protests earlier in the year that prompted a regime crackdown leaving thousands dead, Mr Coningham told FactCheck that getting the regime to dial down its internal repression isn’t high on the US’s priority list.

US involvement becomes a ‘forever war’

With any major US military action in the Middle East comes the question: could this be another “forever war”, with American boots on the ground for years like we saw in Afghanistan?

This would be a major departure from President Trump’s repeated promise: “I’m not going to start wars. I’m going to stop wars”. His critics say he’s already broken this pledge by bombing Iran in the first place. Whether you agree with that view or not, deploying ground troops would be a major escalation.

But Professor Ehteshami says this is only a remote possibility. “I would be very surprised if the US commits ground forces”, he told us. President Trump “understands the magnitude” of such a move, he says, adding that “[the Americans] don’t have sufficient troop numbers”, a deployment would take months to prepare, and it’s “very, very unlikely Congress would approve”.

Urban Coningham agrees that it’s “extremely unlikely” the US would engage in a ground war, adding the White House “feels it can accomplish its goals with airpower alone without it being necessary to deploy ground troops”.

Regime collapse

We often hear politicians and commentators talk about regime change – switching one set of leaders with another. But it’s also possible that Iran could face regime collapse, where the current structure disintegrates without a clear alternative pushing it out.

Urban Coningham explains this scenario “would need not just thousands, but hundreds of thousands or millions on the streets” from “a cross section of Iranian society”. Such protests would have to happen at a scale that the existing regime could not suppress, he says, causing “senior government figures to flee, leaving a vacuum of power in the country”.

Mr Coningham says it’s “really difficult to predict regime collapse” but based on our current understanding of the situation, it’s only “an outlier possibility” in Iran. “At the moment we’re looking at a new leader but the same regime”, he added.

The former Shah’s son takes over

Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran who has lived in exile since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, said this week that “millions” of Iranians consider him the “person uniquely placed to play a role of transitional leadership” in a “bridge” to democracy.

It’s hard to know for sure if Mr Pahlavi is correct about his popularity as polling is notoriously difficult in Iran’s repressive regime. Research conducted by Dutch academics in 2022 and 2025 using anonymous surveys of tens of thousands of Iranians, adjusted to reflect the population as a whole, suggests that around a third of Iranians strongly support the idea of the crown prince leading the transition period in the event of regime change. A further third said they strongly disagreed with the proposal, while the remaining third said they had “no opinion” or less committed views in either direction.

But even with a chunk of the population apparently in favour of his leadership, Mr Pahlavi would struggle to take power as long as the existing regime is in place.

Professor Ehteshami explained that the crown prince “has got nothing behind him” and “his only hope is that there’ll be defections within the military establishment to take over a military base and build something from there, or that military officers carry out a coup in his name”. But, Professor Ehteshami added, while we can expect “fragmentation within the elites” after the US-Israeli strikes, “for them to move 180 degrees to support an untested opposition doesn’t make sense from their vantage point”.

Urban Coningham tells us “within Iran he’s pretty despised by most of the population”, but that Mr Pahlavi might become an interim leader – appointed by Israel and the US – in the event of regime collapse.

Democracy?

Some 89 per cent of Iranians consider a democratic political system to be a “very good” or “fairly good” way to govern the country, according to 2024 polling by the same Dutch team we heard from earlier.

But support for the idea of democracy doesn’t necessarily mean it will come about. It would require either a major transformation at the top of the existing regime or the current leadership to be replaced by a new entity that was willing and able to build democratic institutions.

Despite significant protests in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in recent years – including in an uprising last month which prompted violent retaliation by the then-Ayatollah – there isn’t currently a clear organised group that would have the scale and ability to take over Iran.

Urban Coningham told FactCheck that without regime change there is “absolutely no chance” of democracy (though he notes that “some parts of the [current] regime would claim they have free and fair elections”). However, “if regime change happens”, he says, democracy taking root “would be quite likely”.